There are forums with popular blog sections, e.g. teamliquid.net which also features a wiki. There are also forums that treat top level posts differently, e.g. by displaying them prominently at the top of each thread page. None of this is really new.

On the other hand, I feel that in some regards, LW is too different from traditional forums, like that threads are sorted by OP time rather than the time of the last reply, which makes it very difficult to have sustained discussions in these threads because they stay hot for a few days, but afterwards people simply stop replying, and at best you have two or three people continuing to post without anyone else reading what they write.